Quotes

"Code softly and carry a big CPAN with you.""And now, back to your regularly scheduled perl programming, already in progress...""Perl is like a squirrel's nest. Good stuff is everywhere but most of it is nuts..."Heard in CB: MeowChow's Law: "In any sufficiently long
PerlMonks debate, the monestary will be accused of groupthink."

Me

Some background on me: I am 2**5 as of Jan 6, 2001! The next big power of 2 is thankfully rather far away. I'm married to a girl who things Luke was way too whiny in Empire and soaked up enough geek to make a joke about Citrix less than 4 months after I married her.
I started
programming at 14 in Basic (on a TRS80 model 2!), moved on
to Apple II Basic, TI99/4a Basic Advanced (still makes me laugh),
PC Basic, GWBasic, assembler for x86, asm for apple ][,
Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, Basic for Commodore (school),
COBOL, QuickBasic, ForTran, Lisp, Scheme, C, Perl, C++. (Oh yeah, there
are a number of other languages I sorta absorbed but never
wrote a real program in. =)

I have professional experience designing/normalizing database
tables. I am a MCDBA and have run/fixed Informix, Oracle, Sybase, and various MSSQL servers as well as many open source DBs. I am an AutoCAD/CadKey draftsman (well behind me, tho). I like math, logic
and was stunned by regex the first time I saw it work. =)
I'm a science buff and read scads of science mags and
sites.

I started out on Perl writing sysadmin s‎crip‎ts for an
ISP and did so well designing a tech support database
system while managing the department they made me try
writing it when the perl programmer who hooked me left.
I have since moved on to writing billing engines, intranet
and extranet sites and much more.

Free Soft

I worked on the mod_perl project for a while, mostly whining
and helping debug stuff. I've done just a little to help
out Mozilla and have
tried submitting patches for a couple of other GPL and
opensource projects. I have a small amount of code on CPAN floating around in the cpan:Color::Spectrum module. I try to be OS agnostic but I do love Linux just a little bit more...

Whining

I'm rather sarcastic so I sometimes offend, sorry in advance.

It so sucks doing my
hobby as a job I had to take up video gaming and tinkering
with graphic arts stuff...

Around about 1997, when I first got really cocky with
perl I worked at an ISP. A bunch of the ISP worked because
of me and thus I was forced to attend meetings all the
friggin' time. Whenever possible, I made of nuisance of
myself at these meetings to hopefully ensure that I would
be invited to fewer of them and could get some work done.

One of the ways I annoyed my cow-orkers was by bringing
food as well as drinks to the meeting and my favorite snack
at the time was Animal Crackers. I loved them not only because
they were tasty but because they were cute and you can bite
the heads off them when making a point about business
cruelty.

Being that Perl's mascot was the Camel, I of course saved
them for last and thus would often wind up with a pile of
them on the table when the meeting was up. One day I looked
down and made a joke about scanning them since we had just
moved the scanner to a new <s>sucker</s> employee's desk.

Three days later, I redesigned my personal web site
around the theory that I could make a web page that would
cause all the major browsers at the time to evince different
bugs and at the same time cause people to reel back in horror.
We were forced to keep personal web pages up for
"business" reasons and were encourged to play with new stuff
so we looked trendy. Seriously.

Later that day I decided I needed an Icon for the perl
subsection I was going to put up. And then my little brain
started ticking... So I go over to my new friend and say,
let's scan a camel!

Now, I know nothing of scanners but this one was new
and had mega-features. So we decided to scan the cookie
at 2400dpi to get it hi-res, knowing we can always shrink
it in Photoshop. =)

Math time! 2in x 2.5in x 2400dpi x 2400dpi
x 3bytesperpixel == 86.4 MB. That took like 15 minutes to
scan and at 96dpi screen res would approximately 4 feet tall.
It took photoshop 50 minutes to turn it into a 1.2MB JPG.
It took photoshop 15 minutes to resize that to a reasonable
1280x1024. Cropped and cleaned up at 125x100pixels in GIF
form, it is 7KB. D'oh. 0.00845% of the data left, at most.

Cute tho, huh? Sadly, they finally took that old, crufty
site down. Given the link: http://users.ntr.net/~mark/ you might be able to find the atrocity of HTML in The Internet Archive.
My personal domain's perl page still features the cute little camel (if you can't see it here) with my crappy code.
As a side note, they wouldn't let me post any of the company
code up on the site after all was said and done... they were too afraid our competition would "steal it".

Yes, this is necessary. The use of a camel image in association with Perl
is a trademark of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Used with permission.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other